Using Trello for Workforce Planning

Posted on 7th November 2017

I have to admit, I’ve attempted to use Trello a few times, for different things, but never really stuck with it, until now!

We had one of our Scede.io offsites recently, during which we talked about scenarios we have encountered, how we solved them and generally what’s working and what’s not. One of the topics was sprint planning for sourcing and Trello was discussed as a visual tool to manage hiring group expectations during a hiring campaign and aid visibility across the staffing team.

Whilst playing around with this idea I was having a slightly different challenge with another client. That challenge was capturing their current workforce, splitting by team and being able to collaboratively, with their leadership team, build out the hiring needs for the remainder of the year and into next.

Sure I wasn’t having a problem new to anybody in staffing, but I’ve usually ended up on an excel or a PowerPoint. Located in a different country to the people I wanted to iterate with, my usual method wasn’t optimal. This led me to start playing around further with Trello.

Below are the steps (in the order I wish I went through) to get to the end result I am using today.

“The base”

1) Name each “list” according to the different teams within the organisation

2) Create a “card” for each team member, under the relevant team

3) Create a “card” for each proposed new hire, under the relevant team

“I discovered what a label was”

1) Create a “label” per discipline. In the example I have green for Manager, yellow for Software Engineer & Orange for an Engineer in Test

2) Create a “label” for current employees

3) Create a “label” for your hiring plan

4) Apply the relevant labels to the relevant cards

“I can count”

1) I integrated Butler to help count cards on the board

2) I created rules to help me know the current headcount, the hires needed and total when done

The end result was an online, visual and completely collaborative workforce plan that we can all share and edit from our respective locations.

The cards are all moveable should you think a new hire should be allocated to another team, or you have some internal mobility. You can also add comments to the cards to explain why you moved to another team, or want to query with one of your team.

This is just a simple and completely made up set of numbers and roles. Sure it doesn’t go into the role levelling, detailed org design, role descriptions and reporting structure but it got us to a pretty solid place. Using labels, butler and linking docs to the cards you can record many of those things.

I’m still very much in the early stages of this exploration but wanted to share should it be of use to anybody that’s looking to put together the building blocks of a hiring plan and headcount update to their stakeholders.

We use a version of this Trello Board as point of reference when having staffing updates. It’s a great live overview of both headcount position and progress if you also use labels and Butler to count offers made too.

If you are interested in us opening up a template for public use, then please email matthew@scede.io

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